Life in a Nutshell: Crazy phone messages

BRIAN THOMPSONCompass Columnist

Published Friday, April 20, 2007

Word-for-word, this was the phone message left on my answering machine. It was a gruff sounding voice, like a cross between a grizzly bear and someone who had lived in the South so long that their accent had fermented and taken on complex subtle hints of apple, walnuts, motor oil and dirt. This is what I heard:

Hello, my name is Calvin Johnson and I've been trying to reach Scott Thompson (my brother) for so damn long. He never answers the phone and I'm trying to reach him because I've got this vintage motorcycle. It's still in its box. I think it's a 1955 British some-kind-of-a-G*****n motorcycle. And I understand he's interested and I want to get rid of it. I'm willing to give it away, but he never checks his phone, he never gets his messages. So I understand you're his brother, so will you please tell him if he wants this motorcycle, it's still in the box, it's all shiny looking and it's all new and it looks goooo-ddd. He can have it if he wants it, he just needs to come and get it! Tell him to give me a call. My number is (repeats my phone number) No, that's not it. That's the number I just called. I'm a silly boy! The number is (gives a new number). Get on that boy! Tell him to call me up. See ya, bye."

So I hear this -- remember, think grizzly bear with a Southern accent, but also add in unstable and partly angry -- and I start flipping out. I'm boarding up the windows and the doors. I'm thinking this guy is going to come for me all because my brother -- a vintage bike nut -- and his inferior genes have been blowing him off. He blows everybody off. He never answers his phone, and often people come searching me out to get in touch with him. They must think we're some kind of mafia: "I'll see about getting that message to Don Scott, but I can't promise anything as he's gone underground. I'll leave a note in a tin of espresso on the corner of his street and on the first full moon "

Why my brother and his wife even have an answering machine is beyond me. About the only time they ever check it is if they accidentally hit the play button while chasing one of their three dogs who is eating one of their shoes.

On even rarer occasions, they hear a message and actually return the call. Only thing is, they don't realize it's like 17 weeks too late.

So he calls up to say, "Hey, I just got Nancy's message that you impaled yourself on the roof and need me to come over to carry you down. I'll be right over!"

Don't bother. Seventeen weeks ago I was impaled by some metal on the roof, but it has since rusted through and freed me. If you also got my messages about being hit by a truck and left in the road or that I was trampled by a moose, go ahead and disregard those, too.

Check your messages!

I called my brother up when I got the Southern grizzly's message. "Why don't you check your machine so crazy people like this don't have to call me?"

"Well," he said rather matter-of-factly, "if you don't want to talk with someone crazy like that, what makes you think I do?"

My brother belongs to the Church of Fuzzy Logic.

"Call him back, else I'm going to have to move out of the country. I'll need to get an elephant gun. I'll need to change my number or stop checking MY messages. Call him up!"

A day or so later, he phoned me at work. "Is this the guy who called you?" he asked before playing a message from the same guy over the phone.

"Yes!" I told him. "That's the whack job. You've got to call him back. I think he wants to kill me!"